If you’re a British history buff, or perhaps have just browsed through Charles Dickens’s ever-readable Child’s History of England, you will have encountered the untidy, bloody sequence of events known as the Wars of the Roses.

If not, then, even so, you’ve likely been exposed to the famed “my kingdom for a horse” trope, perhaps even read or watched a performance of William Shakespeare’s blood-soaked play Richard III.

The Wars of the Roses, sometimes called the Cousins’ Wars, were blood-soaked indeed, and they make for a complicated matter—not least because women played so central a role in the conflict, a story that Sarah Gristwood explores in her new book Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. She discusses that book in this across-the-pond exchange with Britannica contributing editor Gregory McNamee.

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Britannica: It’s safe to say that American readers—and perhaps even British readers—are not well familiar with the causes and events of the Wars of the Roses. Would you mind giving us a brief overview?

Gristwood: That’s quite hard to do when historians can’t even agree on when the Wars start and when they finish! But I do see your point. Very broadly speaking, the Wars of the Roses is the name later given to the dynastic conflicts of 1455–85 in which the two great houses of York (the white rose) and Lancaster (the red rose) contended for the English throne. Needless to say, it was all a lot messier and more complicated than that—think Game of Thrones with even more swords, though less sorcery.

Britannica: You make the interesting suggestion that the war opened at a time when the idea of a strong woman ruler was not entirely alien—an idea that took time being revived in later generations. Without the Wars of the Roses, would the reign of Elizabeth (I, certainly, but perhaps even II) have been possible?

Gristwood: It is a challenge trying to trace the connection between the stories of these women and those of later days. If anything, there seems to have been what you might call a downward movement during the course of the late fifteenth century. I’m not sure I’d say that the idea of a woman ruler was acceptable even at the beginning of the period—not in England, anyway. But it was at least possible for Marguerite of Anjou to try to seize the reins of power, while by 1485 there seems to have been no thought that either Margaret Beaufort or Elizabeth of York could actually reign, though they both had a better blood claim than their son and husband Henry VII, respectively.

As for legacies, Elizabeth of York (like Margaret Beaufort, Elizabeth Woodville, and Cecily Neville) was a direct physical progenitor to Elizabeth I, and every king or queen who has since sat on our throne. But when I think of Elizabeth Tudor, I look back also to Marguerite of Anjou, and I think I see a different kind of ancestry.

Credit: courtesy of Basic Books

Britannica: On a related note, apart from human interest in the discovery of bones in parking lots and the like, do the Wars of the Roses have much resonance in British life today—in, say, the British sense of nationhood?

Gristwood: In a sense, the point about the Wars of the Roses now is that they ended, with the Battle of Bosworth, by bringing the Tudor dynasty into being, and the Tudor age was crucial for the world we know today. But what’s also interesting is—with its deals and compromises, its unexpected alliances and shifting allegiances—just how closely that epoch resembled the world we see on the TV news. It’s politics, rather than nice, neat, antiseptic history.

Britannica: Of the seven women whose stories you recount in Blood Sisters, do you have a particular favorite?

Gristwood: I think the one I liked most must be Margaret of Burgundy (or Margaret of York, as she is also called). Cecily Neville, Margaret Beaufort, and Marguerite of Anjou are just too scary. Anne Neville remains a bit of a blank canvas, and we still think of Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth of York chiefly in terms of domesticity. From everything we know about her life in Burgundy, that other Margaret seems to have been what the English used to call a “good egg”—doughty, intelligent, well capable of taking a hand in politics as well as warmly attached to her family.

Not that Henry VII, who was absolutely plagued by her enmity, would have agreed, necessarily…

Britannica: This enters the realm of speculation, perhaps, but with the possible exception of Elizabeth of York—whom you connect to a later “people’s princess”—why is so little known about these women today?

Gristwood: I think that’s actually a comparatively easy question to answer; and there are two reasons, really.

One lies in the sources, which are extremely patchy. There’s a lot of information we just plain don’t have about this period, and about the women particularly. Even just 50 years later, the early 16th century offers far more in the way of personal letters, state papers, and contemporary history. That’s why I chose to follow the whole group of women, rather than doing an individual biography.

The other lies in the very name given to the events of this era—that we do usually think of them as the “Wars,” as an endless chain of battles, and the battlefield was men’s territory, predominantly. In fact, the working of the women behind the scenes would ultimately prove to matter as much, both in the conflict and its resolution—and heaven knows their tales are dramatic enough. But that’s really the point of my story.